SATURN RETURN (SEGUNDO PREMIO) – Review by Jennifer Green
Spain’s International Oscar nominee Saturn Return (Segundo Premio) picked up Best Film and Directing awards at the leading Spanish Film Festival of Málaga last May and has been widely praised by Spanish critics. It’s a film packed with local references and a dedication to its city of origin, Granada, and one that also pulls from a long tradition of on-screen representations of rock-n-rollers from well beyond Spain’s borders.
Content-wise, it should have no trouble appealing to a broader audience, but visually and narratively it’s an ambitious endeavor, making it a bold choice for the Academy Awards.
The film is loosely based around an actual 1990s-era band out of Andalusia called Los Planetas. Titles tell us this is not a story about the band, but rather about the legend of the band. To reinforce this, characters aren’t referred to by name (credits label them “the singer,” “the guitarist” and so on), except for the one female, May (Stéphanie Magnin), who leaves the group in an opening scene.
Spliced together in non-linear vignettes voiced-over as recollections from the main characters (think Daisy Jones & the Six without the on-camera interviews), the story arc is loosely formed around the band’s journey to make a third album after an initial success and then a flop. They’re in need of new musicians after May’s departure.
They also need new songs, but the guitarist’s (Cristalino) descent into heroin addiction is complicating that process. The singer (Daniel Ibañez) is fixated on recording in a New York City studio. He demands a budget for the trip from his music label’s executives, who send him home to make some music first.
New York provides a kind of symbolic counterpoint to Granada, where the bulk of the film is evocatively set. We hear talk of bullfighting, fascists, flamenco and the Alhambra, and a scene shows a Holy Week procession winding through town (complete with traditional white hoods).
The backdrop also evokes a sense of oppressiveness. It’s impossible to escape Granada, the only city named after a bomb (‘grenade’), we’re ominously told. The singer recalls poet Federico García Lorca, also from Granada, who spent time in New York before being turned over to the fascists by a friend back in Spain and executed. Will Los Planetas succumb to their own betrayals and the 90s-era tyranny of drug addiction, or will they escape to New York?
Whether you’re from Andalusia or New England, these characters will feel familiar. You’ve seen their type on screen before – suffering for their art, chain smoking behind raised jacket collars, hiding their mutual homoerotic feelings, raging against the machine, sleeping all day, and finding opioids “worth the risk if you want to write honest songs.” Ibañez and Cristalino embody them perfectly.
Movies about “junkies” are usually full of hallucinations, one of the narrators says, a nod to the feature’s film heritage. The reality, he goes on to clarify, is much darker. Saturn Return makes good on this, purposefully disorienting viewers with fever dream sequences that are likely just figments of drugged imaginations, punctuated with tough scenes of the self-harm and despair that can come from serious drug consumption. Mounds of dirt appear to breathe, bodies levitate and melt through walls, a man has a back-alley encounter with a crocodile.
It all adds up to a showcase for the visual and narrative creativity of co-directors Isaki Lacuesta (One Year, One Night; Between Two Waters) and Pol Rodríguez (Quatretondeta) and the talents of cinematographer Takuro Takeuchi, who has a background in music videos. They’ve crafted a bold and ambitious film that doesn’t always work but deserves to travel – from Granada to New York, and beyond.
